They Say the World Goes On
by Fellowshipper
Summary: Sequel to "Cry For Me", Edge thinks about his relationship with Christian and how the years have changed them both.


Title: They Say the World Goes On  
Disclaimer: If I owned them, I guarantee the televised shows would be more interesting. Mwahaha. Ha.  
Rating: PG-13 for language, character death, general angstiness and sap.  
Continuance Note: Roughly a month after the end of "Cry For Me".  
  
Notes: I, quite honestly, didn't like the way Cry For Me ended. Originally, I'd planned on killing off Christian and dealing with the consequences later. But someone...*glares at various Edge musi, who all wave innocently*...someones, rather, decided that was too harsh. So here I am to try again. Personally, I think it worked out better this way.  
  
Plug o' the Moment: "Bloodsucking Fiends" by Christopher Moore. It's one of the few books I finished in a couple days and it's full of laugh-out-loud-worthy moments. Read it! Reeeeeaaaaad! Ahem.  
  
For Danielle, who called Christian a sellout. Hollywood endings my ass. :P  
  
******  
  
It's not fair. I'm older than you. It's got to be some kind of unwritten law somewhere that the older brother's supposed to die first. It's not right for the younger one to go first. It's just...it's not. You insufferable little bastard. You've always had to be the first to do anything. First to make varsity basketball team. First to win a title in the WWF. First to die. Well. You're not dead yet, but you may as well be.   
  
I can't believe I'm in here now. We were supposed to get old and harass each other with wooden canes, remember? We were going to go to the park, sit on a bench, and throw out marbles in the jogging path to trip the skaters. That's never going to happen now and it's your fault. Sure, theoretically I could still do it alone, but as I sat by myself I'd always see your ghost beside me and hear your laugh when another skater fell. I'll never have that satisfaction now, and it's your fault.   
  
It's my fault that it's your fault.  
  
I'm sitting by your hospital bed, alternating between holding your hand and crying and screaming at your unresponsive body. At times I've done both. I tried slapping you, shaking you, bribing you into consciousness but so far have come up short. I've pleaded, begged, demanded, and prayed for your eyes to open, but the only thing I get in return is the cold, methodical beeping of the machines that keep you alive. It's amazing to think that if one flimsy little cord was pulled, they'd be sending you three floors down, out of the ICU and into the basement morgue.   
  
It's been this way for hours now. I wish you'd just wake up so we can go home. Instead, you lay there, unmoving, pale and expressionless. To be honest, it's actually pretty creepy.   
  
Maybe I should have paid more attention. But you seemed happy for a while. Lately you've even stopped crying yourself to sleep, and the doctor's been decreasing your dosages. Things were getting better, Christian, but you were impatient. You couldn't wait. You wanted everything right away, and because I couldn't give it to you, you fucking hung yourself on the back deck.   
  
When I found you last month, scared and alone on that bridge with every intention to kill yourself, I didn't know what to do. I told you what you wanted to hear -- I loved you. And I did. Do. It was awkward, what with me not being a very emotional person and all, but dammit, Chris, you knew that. You know it now, somewhere deep behind those unblinking eyes.   
  
Mom's going to be here soon. Dad, too. They're going to have to sign the papers to have the machines turned off. I'd imagine that they'd like to say goodbye, too.   
  
I lean back in the chair and rub the heels of my hands against my weary eyes; I haven't slept in over a day, and I'm sure it shows. When my hands drop back into my lap and the spots clear from my vision, I see three white walls surrounding me with another at my back. All of them are white and emotionless, pristine and callous. It's almost elegant, in a detached way. It makes you wonder how much sorrow identical rooms have seen, with their cruelly silent walls that say nothing of grieving families. How many have died, hidden inside these white-walled sanitized prisons?  
  
I walked out a couple hours ago to get some coffee. The nearest place was downstairs by the private rooms sectioned off for the fortunate and mildly injured. A man was in the hallway with his son, holding a bouquet of flowers in one hand and the strings to some balloons in the other. I poured my coffee and watched, horrified, as father and son walked gleefully down the hallway, smiling and even giggling. I wanted to hurt them. Didn't they know that my baby brother lay in a room directly above them, unconscious and to forever be that way? While they went to visit a sick granny, I was making funeral plans in my head. I was thinking of the kid I'd grown up with who was never going to see thirty birthday candles, be married, have kids, worry about putting them through college or retirement plans. All that was taken from him and these fuckers don't even care.   
  
I took it from you.   
  
I wasn't interested in the coffee anymore, so I left a full cup on the table and came back to the room. I haven't left since. The world goes on right outside the door, full of bustling nurses and uptight doctors who can regrow organs but can't help one misguided kid, and I'm still here because my world collapsed. I haven't cried, though. Crying would mean accepting this and acknowledging this as our final moment. I'm not ready for that. Not yet. I'm not letting you go any sooner than I have to.   
  
The familiar sound of the door opening catches my attention and I look across the room, expecting our parents in full stuffy, regal mode. What I get is a rather tired-looking Chris Jericho. He's not in his flashy clothes with lights glinting off sequins and glitter; rather, his jeans are faded, a baggy sweatshirt hides his upper body, and a blond ponytail peeks out the back of a plain, dark tan hat.   
  
"Now now," I mutter, knowing he's here to catch me at a vulnerable moment. "Chris, please, not now."   
  
He sits down, uninvited, in the chair on the other side of the bed. I can see my reflection in his glasses, but behind them I can see angry, hardened blue eyes. "Believe it or not, there are some things in life that don't involve you. I came to see him --" he nods to my brother-- "not you."   
  
"What the hell do you care about him?"   
  
"We've been friends for a while." He pauses, drumming his fingers along the metal railing along the bed and going to great pains to ignore me.   
  
"I drove him to this," I mumble, not meaning for anyone to hear me. Chris sneers up at me.  
  
"You think too highly of yourself. He needed a scapegoat to blame and you were gullible. I think you just finally gave him the last little push he needed. You're too stuck on yourself."   
  
"This coming from the world's biggest ego-maniac."   
  
"At least," he starts, leaning over the barrier, "I let people know right away what I'm like. I don't hide like you do." He stops short to look down at Christian, and I swear I think I see him blink back tears. "How'd this happen?"   
  
I don't want to talk about this. "I..." I won't talk. His pointed glare prods me on. "I left to get some bread 'cause we were out. He'd been acting weird lately, like he was trying too hard to show me he was happy, but I-I didn't think anything about it. I came back from the store and couldn't find him in the house, so I went to see if he'd gotten in the pool and he...he..." I trail off, gesturing to the raw rope marks circling his throat, currently providing the only color against his unnaturally white skin. "I got him down, but he wasn't breathing. The-the paramedics said that he hadn't been for a while a-and they couldn't revive him. When we got here, the doctor said...the doctor said the oxygen to his brain or something had been cut off for too long and he was braindead."   
  
Chris remains quiet, contemplating that while looking over Christian before turning back to me. "You're right. This *is* your fault." I just sit here, gape-mouthed, while Chris goes spastic. "He's your *brother* for Christ's sake! How can you be so...so goddamned analytical about this? You're talking like it's some faceless stranger, not your little brother! Look at you -- I bet you haven't cried once for the kid, have you?" He pauses for breath while I fight for words to defend myself. He beats me to it. "Even back before your team split up, he used to complain to me about how you would scream at him for hours if he lost a match and how you always told him you didn't want a useless loser for a brother. I'd tell him, 'No, Chris, he's just upset. He doesn't mean it.' But now...now I think you did all along." He looks at me with those icy blue, calculating eyes and I break under the pressure.   
  
"I never meant to hurt him." He snorts. "I...I was raised to not get attached to anyone..."   
  
"That's no excuse," he growls, but is prevented from elaborating thanks to the door opening again. He shoots a bitter look at me, more than enough to tell me that we're not done yet, and stalks off. I'd rather he came back, though, because now it's just me alone in a room with two parents coming to say goodbye to their youngest child.   
  
I watch from a distance, as I always have, as they take turns being the strong one. Most would see us as cold and unfeeling, but my family is only an exceptionally guarded one. My parents are strong-willed, defiant, and after my older sister was found raped and murdered in her dorm room when I was thirteen, I learned to be that way too. Christian has always been the odd-one-out, the bleeding heart romantic. He always gave money to bums on the street when others walked by without a thought. He spent his summers as a teen driving old people to grocery stores and pharmacies. He overworked himself, like he was trying to single-handedly atone for my family's indifference. I realize now, too late, he cared too much for others because no one cared for him.   
  
Not even me.   
  
It's not an easy thing to admit, but as I watch the nurse shutting off the machines, I understand with perfect clarity why he felt that way. I never loved him because I wanted to, only from moral obligation because he was my brother. I never helped him with bullies at school or with girls he liked but was afraid to ask out. We never got drunk together and argued over who was going to call our parents to bail us out of jail for indecent exposure. I never got to ask him to be the best man at my wedding and then threaten to kill him because of the drunken toast he made at the reception where he confessed to sleeping with my new bride the previous night.   
  
I'm confused and I don't know what to feel as I listen to the beeping turn into a steady hum as Christian flatlines. Mom's crying, and that strikes me as being particularly strange. I saw Dad cry when the police told him about finding Carrie's body, but I've never seen my mother cry. Christian always joked that Mom would only ever cry on the day Mr. Rogers retired. How fitting that she's crying over Christian himself.   
  
I have to get out. This room, these damned flawless walls, they're stifling. Choking the air from me, killing me as surely as the rope did Christian. I run out into the hallway, looking desperately for an escape. My stomach is lurching and threatening to spill its contents out onto the floor, but I need to find a way out. Somehow. Before I can go, however, I see Jericho watching me by the water fountain, and he even takes a casual sip before heading toward me.   
  
"I just watched my little brother die," I tell him needlessly, and instantly I feel his hand tangling in my hair, turning my head at a sharp, painful angle and shoving my face against the little window in the door of Christian's room. I can feel him trembling with rage and I know he wants to make me suffer. I can't blame him.   
  
"It's your fault," he announces in a low, threatening voice.   
  
"No..."   
  
"Yes it is! Look!" He screamed, his words echoing off the walls. He ignores the curious, frightened looks of patients and visitors alike and uses the hand still in my hair to slam my face hard against the door. I hear something crack and taste blood on my tongue, but he doesn't stop to let me think over my injury. "Your brother's dead because of you, you selfish prick. One of my best friends is dead because all he ever wanted was for you to love him!"   
  
The suspicion had been there all along, but up to that point it had only been a nagging thought I pushed aside. Now, though, hearing the accusation come from someone else's mouth, the realization of what I'd done -- unknowingly -- to my loving, innocent baby brother rocks me to my knees. I sob uncontrollably, crying hysterically on the floor while Chris kneels next to me. Suddenly I don't have the strength to look up at him anymore.  
  
"I'm sorry," I mumble, paying no attention to the blood that drips from my mouth into a puddle on the floor. "Oh, God, Christian, I'm so sorry..."   
  
"That's nice, but the only person who cares to hear that is dead. You might as well have tied the rope yourself."   
  
The words bite deep, hit their mark; I wail into the cold marble against my cheek. "Christian, p-please forgive me."   
  
"He was always better than me, which is good." Jericho leans down further so that our eyes are level. "Because personally, you pitiful son of a bitch, I hope you rot in Hell for what you did to him."   
  
I'm numb and empty as I listen to his boots fall against the floor, eventually getting too quiet to hear. Once again I find my life radically changed by the death of a sibling, and the only thing I can think about is listening to Mom's unemotional deliverance of the eulogy at Carrie's funeral. While I sat in the front pew of the church, staring at the wooden box containing my lifely, cheerful sister who'd been ruthlessly taken from me by some street thug, I listened to my mother talk about how that which does not kill us makes us stronger, and that we would grieve and life would go on.   
  
But as I lay here watching a trail of my blood creep slowly across the floor, my heart aching for the beloved sister I never fully mourned and for the new chunk ripped from it by a brother I didn't know I loved, I have to wonder if I want any part of the world still moving around me. They don't care about me or my pain, or my sister's crushed dreams of being a choir and music teacher, or the homeless Korean girl Christian sponsored through one of those sappy television programs.  
  
They didn't care about Christian, but the hard, painful truth is that I didn't, either. Not how he wanted. He wanted a friend, and I was merely a grudging brother.   
  
The tears come with such intensity they burn my eyes, but I don't stop them. What doesn't kill me makes me stronger, and if it kills me...the world will still go on without me. 


End file.
